Norse Atlantic Airways Offers Dirt-Cheap Tickets. There’s a Catch

On March 31, I received an email from Norse Atlantic Airways. The $940 flights for my upcoming circular travel to Rome had been canceled, it said, and I had 14 days to petition a refund.

At first, I didn’t panic. That began to alteration erstwhile the company’s refund petition leafage wouldn’t load connected 2 browsers crossed 3 devices. After Norse didn’t respond to respective emails, I looked for a telephone number. There wasn’t one. On Reddit, I recovered dozens of posts astir Norse’s allegedly haphazard lawsuit service.

The aforesaid day, I filed a nationalist records petition with the Federal Trade Commission, which I hoped would springiness maine a amended thought of however communal this acquisition was. I yet received astir 75 elaborate complaints from radical who had bought oregon tried to bargain tickets from the airline. Many described a lawsuit work cognition successful which the inability to get successful interaction with a quality created a vacuum that scammers appeared blessed to measurement into. Of the 41 complaints that reported a dollar figure, 21 claimed they mislaid much than $1,000.

Norse Atlantic Airways does person quality lawsuit work workers, but successful caller years, the hose has leaned into a tech-forward approach, deploying AI agents to assistance powerfulness its operation.

“Technology volition assistance america person a higher level of availability and lawsuit support, portion inactive maintaining debased fares for much radical to bask question betwixt continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the company’s main lawsuit and communications officer, tells WIRED.

Yet if what I and dozens of different radical experienced is immoderate indication, this mentation of lawsuit work is time-consuming, frustrating, and astatine times expensive.

The Future Is Now

Norse Atlantic Airways, which was formed successful February 2021, has described itself arsenic a “modern, long-haul, low-cost airline” with a “lean” workforce. Early on, it implemented a instrumentality from the lawsuit work exertion institution Sprinklr that created a “unified” inbox of lawsuit work queries. (Based connected archives of the company’s website, it doesn’t look to person ever listed a lawsuit work number.)

In January 2025, the AI institution Kindly wrote a blog station detailing however it developed a chatbot for Norse alternatingly called “Odin” oregon “Odin’s Wingman.” Norse besides removed the lawsuit enactment email from its enactment leafage successful bid to marque Odin the “primary enactment channel,” according to the Kindly blog post.

By January 2026, Norse had “sunset” the chatbot and replaced it with its existent AI agent, Freya. Delight.ai, the institution that developed Freya, said that the airline’s no-human-intervention enquiry solution complaint “rose from 60 percent to 80 percent” wrong 2 weeks of its introduction.

“We spot the aboriginal of our lawsuit enactment squad arsenic AI cause managers,” Norse’s main merchandise officer, Alf Lim, said successful a Delight.ai blog post. Lim added that Freya is simply a “core portion of the team” astatine Norse.

According to the blog, Freya would let Norse to “upskill” its lawsuit enactment portion into these AI cause managers, which are described arsenic “specialists who continuously optimize, bid and measurement successful erstwhile human-touch is required.”

Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been a occurrence and present manages “99 percent of inquiries from passengers.”

A Scammer’s Paradise

Many of the FTC complaints shared a communal theme: A person, needing to alteration their formation oregon set their booking, searched online for the Norse Atlantic Airways telephone number. Eighteen of the FTC complaints explicitly claimed that the idiosyncratic was scammed aft they Googled Norse’s lawsuit work accusation and recovered scam websites and telephone numbers successful the results.

In immoderate cases, customers claimed they were told they owed wealth for a formation they thought they already paid for. Other times, they said they were told that they had to wage an exorbitant interest successful bid to marque a alteration to their itinerary.